***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-
In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night-Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel"

Markin comment:


This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
************

MARK DINNING
"Teen Angel"

(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love

***A 50^th Anniversary Of Sorts -Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Night- Thanksgiving Football Rally, 1963- For A Brother Who Did Not Make It, Jimmy J., North Adamsville Class Of 1966

 

 

Peter Paul Markin North Adamsville High School- Class of 1964 comment:

 

Make no mistake, despite the lightly- dusted change of names and places to protect the innocent, and the guilty too now that I think about the matter, this honor sketch is about our old town, no question.    

 

Go to this link for the sketch since this site only allows 5000 character messages.  

 

http://talesfromoldnorthquincy.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-50-th-anniversary-of-sorts-out-in.html

 

 

***A 50^th Anniversary Of Sorts -Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Night- Thanksgiving Football Rally, 1963- For A Brother Who Did Not Make It, Jimmy J., North Adamsville Class Of 1966

Peter Paul Markin North Adamsville High School- Class of 1964 comment:

Make no mistake, despite the lightly- dusted change of names and places to protect the innocent, and the guilty too now that I think about the matter, this honor sketch is about our old town, no question.

Scene: Around and inside the old North Adamsville High School gym entrance on the Hunt Street side the night before the big Thanksgiving Day football game against our cross- town arch-rival Adamsville High in 1963. For those who are not familiar with North Adamsville or who through the ravages of time, too much booze, too many drugs, or too many, well just too many Hunt Street is the street that had the Merit gas station, now Hess, on the corner. A place where we filled up, we who owned such treasures, that dream 1957 Chevy that had everybody turning their heads, every girl, or more likely our father’s Plymouth on pretty please loan, just be careful with the damn thing and, yes, fill ‘em up before you bring it home, home by midnight, no later and no arguments.

The street itself is fairly non-descript, filled, like most streets in the Atlantic section with double and triple-decker houses, mostly two unlike kindred, Irish kindred, Dorchester (Dot, okay) and South Boston (Jesus, Southie, okay) and small lot single family houses, cottages really all packed closely together against the unimproved land behind the street. Houses representing, those small lot cottages too closely packed together representing, that nagging hunger of our parents to have a small piece of the American pie after the turmoils of the want-filled Great Depression 1930s. And after slogging through World War II during the heart of the 1940s, short-cutting their youth, carrying a rifle on the shoulder, or home fires waiting, waiting for Johnny and Jimmy to come back, come back in one piece, please. And their broods, their spawn (nice word, huh), like their brethren on Billings Road , Faxon Road, Hancock Street, East Squantum Street, Young Street, Newbury Street, the seven tree-named streets, the five ocean- signified streets, fill, over-fill, the four grades of the high school that the baby-boomer explosion, their explosions, has created. That motley will be well-represented this pre-game rally night. No question.

[By the way thinking about that Atlantic section of the old townevery grandmother, every second or third generation resident grandmother, calling, no, cursing, under their breathe cursing the place, cursing “one-horse Atlantic” from the days when one needed to “go up the Downs” to get family provisions and services, or go without.]

Of course the time of which I speak is a time before they built what is apparently, that apparently due to many years away from the old school and not up on changes until recently, a significant addition to the school on that side of the building modeled on the office buildings across the street behind the MBTA stop and a tribute to “high” concrete construction, and lowest bidder imagination. Then though only a recently constructed new gym, an American Standard gym, also reflecting concrete construction and lowest bidder imagination, anchored that part of the building.

This night the spawn (still nice, huh) I spoke of, a generous proportion of them seniors taking one last memory home before the deluge of a candid world hits them come June. Others too are present some at some ghostly sufferance from lowly and despised frosh, barely passable sophomores, and presentable juniors, some of their parents taking a minute out from festive next day preparations. More, a gentle sprinkling of teachers, mostly teachers who had half a heart and maybe tossed a kind word once. the hard-assed don’t mix with the rabble that sit before them day after day, a motley of alumni recent and ancient, ancient seemingly from founder Adams’ time. More still a selection of the town waywards looking for warmth before a warm furnace-fueled gym for a couple of hours usually closed against the night, and some boosters, alumni or not, who have for their own reasons decided to cast their fates and bleed red and black like true Red Raiders whatever high school they might have graduated from before landing in old North Adamsville. All are milling in the front door of the gym waiting to purchase booster tickets, pompoms, red and black naturally to be waved, endlessly waved that evening at the slightest prompting, three for a dollar raffle tickets to support some senior class project, most likely that trip to Mexico that Miss Pratt was trying to put together, in the foyer inside making stealthy preliminary observations about who and who was not present, and with whom if present, or the forlorn, the luckless or just plain woe-begotten are already in the bleachers trying to put on a brave front against the hard fact, the hard school social fact that they do not fit in.

And that is our scene in those long last moments before the annual rally is to begin. But, frankly, it could have been a scene from any one of a number of years in those days. A time when the social cohesion of the whole North Adamsville village glued the community around a common ritual, a rite of passage if you like. A time when the denizens of the Dublin Grille over on Sagamore Street (or the Irish Pub on Billings Road, Guido’s on Atlantic Avenue, Patty’s Pub on Wollaston Boulevard, I know, I know Adamsville Shore Drive, Bruno’s on East Squantum it was all the same except the locations), mostly working-class Irishmen and a scattering of Italians abandoned their cherished bar stools and cozy booths, including my father and other kindred, and hiked the five blocks to the high school to root the latest edition of the gridiron's goliaths on. A time too when such endeavors as football (and fast cars, “watching the submarine races” with your honey down at Adamsville Beach, HoJo’s ice cream, Fourth of July celebrations, your first drink of alcohol) were cultural ornaments of that second or third generation of immigrants, European immigrants. And I am willing to bet six-two-and-even with cold hard cash gathered from my local ATM against all takers that this story “speaks”, except for the names, to those who dwell in the town today as well. Listen up:

Sure the air was cold, you could see your breath making curls before your eyes no problem, and the night felt cold, cold as one would expect from a late November New England night. I could too as I joined the mob trying to run the gauntlet in the foyer and see what is what, see what they evening may bring, stealthy observation bring. A mass of humanity was moving, bundled up against the weathers, toward that gym entrance front door quickly from automobiles parked helter-skelter on the several streets adjacent to the high school. Others have short- haul walked from the tree-named streets, maybe the ocean-named streets too probably quicker that night than driving except for those who will meander down toward frosty Adamsville Beach after the rally to join the other fogged-windowed cars to do, well to do in case there are grandkids around, okay. Still others took that old fume -filled Eastern Mass bus that never seemed to show on time, never when you were in a hurry or it was cold, cold like that night and waiting in some half-baked lean-too for shelter froze the toes.

It was also starless, as the weather report was projecting rain, maybe freezing rain if the temperature dipped for the big game. Damn, not, damn, because I was worried about, or cared about a little rain. I’ve seen and done many things in a late November New England winter rain, and December and January rains too, for that matter. Faced gales coming out of hell Bay of Fundy around Maine shorelines, watched, watched in horror, and candidly fear, as double-seawalls could not hold Mother Nature back when a big blow came through Marblehead Neck one time, got drowned, soaked to the bone, in pelting rain Newport, really Block Island so a little sleet would not have bothered me then. No, this damn, was for the possibility that the muddy Veterans Stadium field would slow up our vaunted offensive attack. And good as that attack was guided by Tim Riley and rambling wreck Bullwinkle (no further name need be given for that moniker says it all about the rambling wreck who thrilled us with his dogged forward, ever forward slashes and thrusts against mere mortals and who is rightly immortalized in the old school’s hall of fame), a little rain, and a little mud, can be the great equalizer.

This after all is class struggle. No, not the kind that you might have heard old Karl Marx and his boys talk about, you know the workers who produce whatever needs to be produced and the bosses grabbing a big share, a big wad of dough, from that production, although now that I think of it there might be something to that theory here as well. I’ll have to check that out sometime but just then I was worried, worried to perdition, about the battle of the titans on the gridiron, rain-soaked granite grey day or not. See, this particular class struggle was Class A (more boys) Adamsville against Class B (fewer boys) North and we needed every advantage against this bigger school. (Yes, I know for those younger readers that today’s Massachusetts high schools are gathered in a bewildering number of divisions and sub-divisions for some purpose that escapes me but when football was played for keeps and honor simpler designations like A and B worked just fine.)

Do I have to describe the physical aspects of the gym? Come on now this thing is any high school gym, any public high school gym, anywhere. Foldaway bleachers, foldaway divider (to separate boys for girls in gym class, if you can believe that), waxed and polished floors made of sturdy wood, don’t ask me what kind (oak, maybe) with various sets of lines for its other uses as a basketball or volleyball court. If you have not been in a high school gym in a while or you want to invoke memory lane check out the school dance scene in the baby-boomer coming -of –age- in- the-early- 1960s classic film, American Graffiti, where you will see what I mean. (Yeah, I know car-crazed, souped-up hot-rod valley boys and girls Modesto was not our pristine ocean-swell shoreline borrow your father’s car, some Nash Rambler or something, with the usual caveats about fueling the thing up, not crashing the thing into some wall and bring it home early but the gyms were the same, the dreams were the same, and the awkward boy-girl-dance thing, jesus, you know that was the same, and maybe still is.)

That should do it on the architecture of the gym. I will not, I swear I will not, go on and on like some latter day Marcel Proust about the decorations that festooned the walls and rafters, except they were strewn hither and yon throughout the gym. A few hand-make posters seemingly drawn by somebody’s younger brother or sister before nap time urging Go Raiders, Beat Adamsville, or some team member designated by shirt number to do those things. But mainly the place was filled with black and red little cheap crepe throw-away banners. Not just black and red though Red Raider black and red, black signifying who knows what but red, blood red signifying that we bled Raider red, or we had better that night.

The most important thing though was that guys and gals, old and young, students and alumni and just plan townies were milling about waiting for the annual gathering of the Red Raider clan, those who had bled, have bled, bleed or wanted to bleed Raider red, and even those oddballs that didn’t. This upcoming battle, as always, stirred the blood of even the most detached denizen of the old town. That night of nights, moreover, every unattached red-blooded boy student, in addition to performing his patriotic duty, was looking around, and looking around frantically in some cases, to see if that certain she had come for the festivities, and every unattached red-blooded girl student, ditto on the duty, for that certain he. Don’t tell you didn’t take a peek, or at least give a stealthy glance.

Among this throng are a couple of fervent quasi-jock male students, one of them who is writing this sketch, the other, great track man, Bill Brady, was busy getting in his glances, both members of the Class of 1964, with a vested interest in seeing their football-playing fellow classmates pummel the cross- town rival. And also, in the interest of full disclosure, were both in the hunt for those elusive shes. I did not see the certain she that I was looking for, that classmate Dora, a girl as crazy for politics, history, modern literature, and poetry, yes, poetry what of it, who had told me earlier in the day before the close of school for the first long weekend of the year that she would come, if she could, and who I often dreamed of then. But, as was my perfidious nature then, I had also taken a couple of stealthy glances at some alternate prospects.

This, the final football game of our final football-watching season, as students anyway, had us bringing extra energy to our night’s performance, including purchase of those tacky crepe pompom shakers. Jesus, all because some girl Bill was interested in was on the Boosters Club table as we came in. We were on the prowl and ready to do everything in our power to bring home victory. ....Well, almost everything except donning a football uniform to face the opposing monstrous goliaths of the gridiron. We fancied ourselves built for more "refined" pursuits like running around the streets of the old town in shorts in all weathers almost getting run over by irate drivers and sidewalk walkers as trackmen, those just mentioned stealthy glances, and that sort of thing.

Finally, after much hubbub (and, as I observed the scene, more coy and meaningful looks all around the place than one could reasonably shake a stick at) the rally began. At first somewhat subdued due to the very recent trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the dastardly murder of one of our own, Jack, down in cowboy wild west heathen Texas, especially for the many green-tinged Irish partisans among the crowd. I had been particularly hard-hit since I had walked the streets of the old town putting campaign literature in every doorway and had bought, bought heavily into the fresh green dream of a “newer world” that his election had heralded. We all remember where we were that previous week, and although we have forgotten much some fifty years later not that.  Most of us were in class when the announcement that the President had been mortally wounded was made over the P.A. system. We had lost some of our innocent, and, worse, that promise for the young heralded by his election, that making and doing good in the world, whether you bought into the New Frontier or not seemed an unlikely promise. But everyone, including me, seemingly, had tacitly agreed that for that little window of time the outside world and its horrors would not intrude.

A few obligatory (and forgettable) speeches by somber and lackluster school administrators, headed by Mr. Jim Walsh, and their lackeys in student government and among the faculty uniformly stressed good sportsmanship and that old chestnut about it not mattering about victory but how you played the game droned away. Of course, no self-respecting “true” Red Raider had anything but thoughts of mayhem, maybe murder too if it could have been gotten away with, and of casting the cross-town rivals to the gates of hell in his or her heart so this speechifying was so much wasted wind. This “bummer” prelude, obligatory or not, was followed with a little of this and that, mainly side show antics. People, amateurishly, taking the floor and twirling red and black things in the air, and the like. Boosters or Tri-Hi-Yi types for all I knew. Certainly they were not in the same league as the majorettes, who I would not hear a word against, and who certainly know how to twirl the right way. See, I was saving one of my sly, coy glances for one of them just then, sweet Rita Givens.

What every red-blooded senior boy, moreover, and probably others as well, was looking forward to by then was the cheer-leading to get things moving led by the senior girls like the vivacious Ruth Goward, the spunky Jenny Weinfeld, and the plucky Laura Pratt. They did not fail us with their flips, dips, double something stuff, gymnastic stuff that I don’t remember the names of except I couldn’t do in gym class, not even close, and hearty rah-rahs. Strangely, the band, a motley of brass-players, drummers and clangers led by that bevy of majorettes when it was their turn, with one exception and you know the exception, did not inspire that same kind of devotion, although no one can deny that some of those girls could twirl.

But all this spectacle was so much, too much, introduction. For what was wanted, what was demanded of the situation, up close and personal, was a view of the Goliaths that will run over the cross- town arch-rival the next day. A chance to yell ourselves silly. The season had been excellent, marred only by a bitter lost to a bigger area team on their home field, and our team was highly regarded by lukewarm fans and sports nuts alike.

Naturally, in the spirit, if not the letter of high school athletic ethos, the back-ups and non-seniors were introduced first by Coach Lion. Then came the drum roll of the senior starters, some of whom had been playing for an eternity it seemed. Names like guiding hand Tim Riley, speedy Will Simmons, husky Len Munson, beefy Peter Duchamp, steady Jack Zona, reliable Dick McNally, redoubtable ( don’t ask him what that means, please) Jeff Fallon, wily Carl McDonald, dingbat Stewart Chase, mad dog "Woj" (Jesus, don’t forget him. I don't need that kind of madness coming down on my face, even now.), and on and on.

Oh, yes and “Bullwinkle,” a behemoth of a run-over fullback, a night train wreaking havoc over many a solid defensive line even by today’s standards. Yes, let him loose on that arch-rival's defense. Whoa. But something was missing. A sullen collective pout filled the room. After the intros were over the suddenly restless crowd needed verbal reassurances from their warriors that the enemy was done for. And as he ambled up to the microphone and said just a couple of words we got just that reassurance from “Bullwinkle” himself. He grunted the words “Victory over Adamsville.” That was all we needed. Boys and girls, this one was in the bag. And as we shortly thereafter headed for the exits to dream our second-hand dreams of glory the band, a little less subdued then, played the school fight song, On North Adamsville to the well-known tune of On Wisconsin.

Yes, those were the days when boys and girls, the young and old, the wise or ignorance bled Raider red in the old town. Do they still do so today? And do they still make those furtive glances at certain hes and shes? I hope so.

 

***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- When Billie Fought To Be Church Hall Dance Champ

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Recently I read a short CD review by my old high school times friend, Peter Paul Markin (actually just after high school graduation friend where we met at a dance club pursuing the same young woman who in the end went off with somebody else) who, seemingly, has endlessly gone back to his early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. His central premise was that while time and ear had eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seemed obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for his/our generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music. I have no quarrel with that premise and we have discussed it subsequently over many a cold winter drink. 

Those conversations got me thinking though about my own separate road to rock at a time when we, we small-time punk (in the old-fashioned sense of that word), we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Peter Paul who I did not know then but another who I will talk about some other time later, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery-operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears, at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household (Markin's too when we later laughed about the similarities of our early teenage household existences) not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Yah right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.

And that pious, quietist, chase the devil and his (or her) devil’s music away, say a million Acts of Contrition, church-bent, Roman Catholic church-bent, part formed a great deal of the backdrop for how we related to that break-out rock music. And why we had to practically form a secret cult to enjoy it. Now you all know, since you all went to elementary school just like I did, although maybe you didn’t attend in the Cold War, red scare, we-could-all-be-bombed-dead tomorrow 1950s like I did, that those mandatory elementary school dances where we rough-hewn boys learned, maybe we learned, our first social graces were nothing but cream puff affairs. Lots of red-faced guys and giggling girls. Big deal, right?

What you maybe don’t’ know, especially if you were not from a working-class neighborhood (or a pubic housing project) made up of mainly Irish and Italian Roman Catholic families like I was is that “cream puff” school stuff was seen by the Church (need I add any more identifying words?) as the devil’s playground. Later, I found out from some Protestant friends that their church leaders felt the same way. No, not those Universalist-Unitarian types who think everything humankind does that is not hurtful is okay but real hard-nosed Protestants, like Episcopalians, Baptists, and Presbyterians. So to counter that secular godlessness, at least in our area, the Church sponsored Friday night dances. Chaste, very chaste, or that was the intention, Friday night dances.

Now these dances from the outward look would look just like those devil-sponsored secular school dances. They were, for example, held in the basement of the church (St. whoever, Our Lady of the wherever, The Sacred whatever, or fill in the blank), a basement, given the norms of public architecture, was an almost exact rectangular, windowless, linoleum-floored, folding chairs and tables, raised stage replica of the elementary school auditorium. That church locale, moreover, when dressed up like on those Friday nights with the usual crepe, handmade signs of welcome, and refreshment offerings also looked the same.

And just so that you don’t think I am going overboard they played the same damn (oops) music as at school, except the sound system (donated, naturally, by some pious parishioner, looking for good conduct points from the fiery-eyed "fire and brimstone" pastor) was usually barely audible. The real difference then, and maybe now, for all I know, was that rather than a few embarrassed public school teacher-chaperones drafted against their wills, I hope, or like to hope, every stick-in-the-mud person (or so it seemed) over the age of eighteen was drafted into the lord’s army for the evening. Purpose: to make sure there was no untoward, unnatural, unexpected, or unwanted touching of anything, by anyone, for any reason. So, now that I think about it, this was really the Friday night prison dance. But not always.

Of course all of this remembrance is just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. The Billie who wanted fame and fortune (or at least girls) so bad that he could almost taste it. The Billie who entered a teenage talent show dressed up like Bill Haley and whose mother-made suit jacket arms fell off during the performance and he wound up with all the girls in schools as a consolation prize. Yes, that Billie, who also happened to be my best friend, or, maybe, almost best friend we never did get it straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the music, rock music that is.

During the summer, and here I am speaking of the summer of 1958, these church-held dances started a little earlier and finished a little later. That was fine by us. But part of the reason was that during July (starting after the Fourth Of July, if I recall) and August there was a weekly dance-off elimination contest. Now these things were meant to be to show off partner-type dancing skills so I never even dreamed of participating, although I was now hip to the girl thing (or at least twelve-year old hip to it), and gladly. Not so Billie. You know, or if you don’t then I will tell you so you know now, that Billie was a pretty good singer, and a pretty good shaker as a dancer. Needless to say these skills were not on the official papal list of ways to prove you had some Fred Astaire-like talent. What you needed to demonstrate, with a partner, a girl partner, was waltz-like, fox-trot stuff. Stuff you were glad to know when last, slow dance time came around but not before, please, not before.

But see, if you didn’t know before, I will remind you, Billie was a fiend to win a talent contest, a contest that, the way he figured it, was his ticket out of "the projects" and into all the cars he wanted, all the girls, and half of everything else in the world. Yah, I know, but poor boys have dreams too. And I don’t suppose it is too early to remind you, like I did with the lost sleeve teenage talent show, that Billie later spent those pent-up energies less productively, much less productively once he knew the score, his score about life. Today though, this night, this Friday night, at the start of the contest Billie is going for the brass ring. See, Billie, secretly, at least secretly from me, was taking dance lessons, slow dance lessons with Rosalie, Christ Rosalie, the prettiest girl in our class, the girl that if I had known the word then I would have called fetching, very fetching. That was, and is, high praise from me. And, see also, teaching the pair the ropes was none other than Rosalie’s mother who before she became a mother was some kind of dance queen (I don’t know, or don’t remember, if I knew the details of that woman’s prior life before then). It was almost like the fix was in.

Now you know just as well as I do that I have no story, or at least no story worth telling, if Billie and Rosalie don’t make it out of the box, if they just get eliminated quickly. Sure they made it, and now they are standing there getting ready to do battle against the final pair for the sainted dance championship of the christian world, projects branch. Now my take on the dancing all summer was there wasn’t much difference, at least noticeable difference, between the pairs. I think the judges thought so too, the junior priest, a priest that the pastor threw into this dance thing because he was closer to our ages than the old-timer "fire and brimstone" pastor was, and four ladies from the Ladies' Sodality usually took quite a bit of time before deciding who was eliminated. Rosalie’s mother (and my mother, as well) thought the same thing when we compared notes. See, now with Billie under contract (oh, yah, naturally I was his manager, or something like that) I had developed into an ace dance critic. Mainly though, I was downplaying the opposition to boost my pair's chances, and, incidentally, falling, falling big, for Rosalie. And not just for her dancing.

So here we were at the finals. It was a wickedly hot night in that dungeon basement so the jackets and ties, if wore (and that needed to be worn by the contestant males), were off. Also, by the rules, each finalist couple got to choose its own music and form of dancing. The first couple did this dreamy Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers all hands flailing and quick-movement thing that even impressed me. After than performance, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billie talking to Rosalie, talking fast and talking furiously. Something was up, definitely, something was up.

Well, something was up. Billie, old sweet boy Billie, old get out of the projects at any cost Billie, old take no prisoners Billie decided that he was going to stretch the rules and play to his strength by doing a Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock jitterbug thing to show the judges his “moves” and what we would now call going "outside the box." And he had gotten Rosalie, sweet, fetching, deserves better Rosalie, to go along with him on it. See, Rosalie, during all those dance lesson things had fallen for old Billie and his words were like gold. Damn.

I will say that Billie and Rosalie tore the place up, at least I guess Billie did because I was, exclusively, looking at Rosalie who really danced her head off. Who won? Let me put it this way, this time the judges, that priest and his coterie of do-gooders didn’t take much time deciding that the other couple won. Rosalie was crushed. Billie, like always Billie, chalked it up to the "fix" being in for the other couple. Life was against the free spirits, he said, something it took me a lot longer to figure out. Rosalie's family moved away not long after that contest, like a lot of people just keeping time at the projects until their ships to better days came in, and I heard that she was later still furious at Billie for crossing her up with that fast-dancing. Yah, but, boy, she could twirl that thing. 

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

Thirteen-The Sons Of Franz Fanon

…he took the lashes, took the bitter lashes, the sable slave lashes in Pharaoh times, he took the ocean swells to the bottom unnoticed, Mister unnoticed, in Middle Passage time, he took the ebony lashes again in Mister Mississippi goddam plantation black code time, a time to make him studied ignorant, or else, ignorant of his history, of his past, of his kin except for hot sun cotton fields, and more hot sun cotton fields, he took the rope, he took the no hope, he took the Mister walk here, not there, sit here, not there, stand here, not there in Jim Crow time, he took his down-turned head in “talented tenth” time when he was not of the better sort, hell, he even kept that head down in “new negro” times when they were separating out the small pie portions. He, hell, he had had enough, enough of broken down internal rages, enough of unchallenged Mister hurts, enough of okie/arkie nobodies jim, get backs, enough of every kind of glad hand indignity. Enough.

And then he found his way out, or a way out, then he remembered, if he remembered rightly, that all over the world in in the old days Russia places, red guard arms in hand, when he was just a kid in China places, people’s army arms in hand, right now, right this minute now, in Vietnam places where they were raising holy hell with Mister, with arms in hand, some of Mister’s own too, and above all in great Mother Africa, arms in hand, they were shoving Mister into the sea, if they let him get that far. Above all he remembered Algeria struggle, Algeria which he knew about from some brother telling him that this West Indian guy, this doctor, this head doctor, said that in the end if you didn’t pick up the gun, if you did not make a sacrificial act, if you just waited around for Mister to give you bread and butter that you would never right Pharaoh wrongs, Middle Passage wrongs, Mister plantation wrongs, Mister James Crow wrongs, hell even talented tenth and new negro wrongs (who were they to decide anyway). That anything that he was given without a righteous cleansing struggle would turn to ashes in his black-skinned mouth.

And so he picked up the gun, picked it up easily, laughingly (Mister laugh) held it barrel to the blue sky in public, learned to shoot the damn thing, and felt himself purified, slave purified for once in his down presser man life, and walked with certain swagger, an angel swagger, and when some Johnny Reb okie transplant tried to take his measure he just showed “the colors.” Beautiful to see that white ass turned, turned way around. And funny too others too picked up the gun to avenge ancient hurts and they formed a brotherhood, solid, and declared, declared among themselves at first, until Mister heard it through the grapevine, that stinking new negro grapevine, war on that foreign country that he lived in, that Algeria in America country, like that head doctor talked about. And then things, thing started to get interesting, and bloody…

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 

***In Honor Of Phillip Sydney Hoffman

Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die- British Style- “Pirate Radio”- A Film Review

DVD Review

Pirate Radio, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, directed by Richard Curtis, Focus Film, 2009
First Question: Who put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll? Well, of course, Bo Diddley (okay, okay others too). Second Question: Who brought rock ‘n’ roll to your double-locked bedroom, dank cellar, storage-filled garage, or other secret ear place back in old time battery-operated transistor radio (pre-iPod-MP3 times, fossil age alright) days? Well, of course, your local dee-jay who helped you while away your night, your dream-plagued rock ‘n’ roll night, with his (mainly) mile-a-minute-banter, selection of platters (records, pre-CD, DVD, iTune, YouTube, you’ve heard about them, right?-shiny black vinyl discs with grooves), and, yes, selected advertising targeted to the newly enriched (maybe) teenager with disposable dollars.

Rich enough to buy records, eat non-mother made burgers, fries, and pizza washed down with Coke or Pepsi at the Adventure Car-Hop, maybe moving up the scale your own radio, television set stuff like that. For the older set-older guys set all kinds of accessories for that souped-up Chevy that had all the girls going, well just call it going. Such names as Allan Freed, Wolfman Jack, Murry the K, and Arnie Ginsberg come quickly to mind. And although the music, praise be, outlasted the careers and remembrance of that lot this classic rock period is associated in my mind (and yours too, I bet) with that very dee-jay night. And that, my friends, is the premise behind this very nicely done trip down rock memory land- British version.

In many ways the British 1960s rock explosion paralleled the American classic rock scene, although later than that genre’s American 1950s heyday. The greatest difference, however, is the way that British audiences heard their rock- literally through the pirate radio of the title. Off-shore, out in the ocean depths, white waves splashing against some barnacled old tub of a ship, rock radio. Without getting into the ins and outs of British broadcasting traditions the battle, the age-old battle really, here is between those who wanted to listen to rock and not just in that double-locked bedroom mentioned above, and those nasty governmental officials and their hangers-on who wanted to outlaw it by shutting down this uncontrolled pirate method. That battle drives the tension and plot line to almost bizarre (by today’s cyberspace standards) ends. But what this film is about is a bunch of guys (mainly, again) who loved to play rock, who loved to present it in their own fashion, and who wanted the fame, fortune (and, incidental sex) that came with heroic dee-jay-dom.

This motley crew is ready to go down with the ship, literally, in order to keep rock freedom alive. Of course there are more than a few gag (British gag, ala Monty Python) scenes that are better left unmentioned but this is a feel good movie with plenty of drugs, sex, and rock and roll on the high seas. Jesus. You might ask what was wrong with that? Ah, come to think of it what was wrong with that? The cast includes the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman (a very versatile actor when you realize that he also played American novelist Truman Capote in the In Cold Blood execution-driven drama Tru) as the Count, the only American in the lot. But this whole mix of radio personalities is a good out in the seas rock night, late night, early morning and so on. So, here is the drill. Bo (and, yes, others) put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll but the Count and the boys put the bop in the be-bop pirate radio night. See this one.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)

 

Markin comment:

Politics is sometimes a strange business. We all recognize that history does not exactly repeat itself. And it is also true that humankind makes its own history- although not always to its liking. Some things though, like the communist defeat in the Greek Civil War, despite our disagreements with its Stalinist leadership, were definitely not to our liking, but may be capable of reversal. Or at least of a modicum of historical justice. That is the backdrop of today's fight by the working class in the streets of Greece. May they win, and win big.

Avenge the lost in the 1946-49 civil war!

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)

The document that follows, which is meant to serve as an outline introduction to the rest of this collection, consists of an extract from a much longer article published by Diethnistis (Internationalist) publications in Greece, written during the dictatorship of the colonels and published in 1979. Our English text is a slightly amended version of that contained in Documents of the Workers Vanguard (Greece) under the title of Fifty Years of Mistakes and Betrayals of the KKE (pp.124-59), omitting that part dealing with the period after the end of the Greek Civil War.
The author, Loukas Karliaftis (Costas Kastritis) was born in 1905, and started his revolutionary career as a member of the tendency of Tzoulatis, the left. tendency of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece (SEKE), at the age of 16 in 1921. He has remained a Communist and a Trotskyist ever since. From 1927 onwards he was an organiser for the Archeiomarxists in Athens and the Piraeus and in the neighbouring towns. A shoemaker by profession, he played an energetic part in the early years of the Greek trade union movement. He was sent to Thessalonica in 1930 to organise a municipal election campaign for an Archeiomarxist candidate, organised Workers Step, was arrested, but escaped. He was arrested again in Kavalla (Macedonia), and was sentenced to a month in prison. He was again arrested in Xanthi in Macedonia, and was then exiled without trial. Then he was brought up before a court and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, but escaped on his way to exile.
As a member of the Archeiomarxists he functioned as an organisational link alongside Giotopoulos (Witte) (1901-1965), and in the early 1930s led the Trotskyist campaign for the United Front that gained significant support amongst the working class, even though it was eventually undermined by the Stalinists. As a leading member of the Central Committee-of KOMLEA (the Archeiomarxists, the Greek Section of the International Left Opposition) in 1932 he represented about 50 trade unions led by them in discussions to form a United Front with other trade union leaders. Although he supported Witte in his agreement with Trotsky over the German debacle of 1933 and the need for a new international, when Trotsky broke with Witte he took Trotsky’s side in the dispute and became a leading cadre of the split led by Vitsoris in 1934, which united with the OKDE of Pouliopoulos in 1938 to form the EOKDE, the Greek section of the newly formed Fourth International.
He was again exiled for one and a half months in 1935, and was again arrested and tortured in 1938, spending the next few years in prison camps at Acronauplia and Neokastro on Pylos along with hundreds of KKE (Greek Communist Party) militants. He played an important part in organising the Trotskyists during and after the Second World War, and took an energetic part in the events of December 1944, narrowly escaping assassination by the OPLA (the Stalinist Secret Police) earlier in the year. By then he was bringing out the journal Workers Fight, and secured a majority after the unification congress of the Greek Trotskyist groups in 1946, becoming its General Secretary. In this capacity he was the organisation’s first speaker at the debate held with the Stalinists in Athens in October 1946. He was afterwards cut off from the rest of the international Trotskyist movement due to the civil war and the repression that followed it. The Greek Section led by Christos Anastasiades remained loyal to the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo during the split of 1953, and the Karliaftis tendency broke with them in 1958. When contacts were renewed abroad the document of the International Committee of 1961, World Prospects for Socialism, was translated, and links were made with the International Committee of Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert in 1964, the Karliaftis group becoming its Greek section.
As leader of the Ergatike Protoporeia (Workers Vanguard) along with L. Sklavos, he took an energetic part in the revolutionary disturbances that shook Greece in the summer of 1965, and the group sent representatives to the Third World Congress of the International Committee in 1966. The group split just before the coming to power of the dictatorship of the colonels in 1967, and many of its members were either imprisoned or fled abroad. Continuing his revolutionary activity under the colonels, Karliaftis was arrested and interrogated, but was released due to his age. When the International Committee recognised the group of Sklavos as its official section in 1972, Karliaftis’ tendency was expelled, and when the dictatorship came to an end it had been overtaken in numbers by the organisations loyal to the International Committee and the United Secretariat. It has published a monthly journal, Diethnistis (Internationalist) since 1964, and has produced a large number of pamphlets, as well as translations of the writings of Trotsky into Greek. Karliaftis’ major work, published under the pseudonym of Costas Kastritis, is his ’Istoria tou Mpolsebikismos sten ’Ellada (History of Bolshevism in Greece), published by Ergatike Protoporeia, of which four volumes have appeared to date. The journal from which our text is taken also includes substantial pieces bearing on the history and politics of his organisation, The Balkans: Ingredients of an Explosion (1971), A Criticism of Six Years of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Relation to Its Greek Section (1972), The November Events in the Light of Marxism (1974) on the Polytechnic Uprising, The Bolivian Revolution and the Deviations of the FOR (1971) and The War Question and Pabloite Revisionism (1966).
The latter text, which contains important insights into the history of the Greek and international Trotskyist movement during the Second World War, was also printed in Fourth International magazine (International Committee), volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, pp.134-6, and was discussed by Voix Ouvriere (the modern Lutte Ouvriere group) in On the Degeneration of the Fourth International. Concerning a text of the Workers Vanguard, and Origin of the Degeneration of the Fourth International in Class Struggle/Lutte de Classe, new series no.1, February 1967, pp.18-26, and no.2, March 1967, pp.14-8. The document on The Bolivian Revolution and the Deviations of the FOR is also to be found in Fourth International magazine (International Committee), volume 7 no.4, Summer 1972, pp.l53-62, and in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, volume 6, New Park, 1974, pp.128-50. It brought forth a rejoinder from Savas Michael, the leader of the Workers International League, the group that had split from Karliaftis’ Workers Vanguard and remained loyal to the International Committee, Workers Vanguard and the Bolivian Revolution, in Fourth International, volume 8 no.1, Winter 1972-73, pp.7-14, reproduced in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, volume 6, pp.151-68, which contains a number of interesting details about the history of Greek Trotskyism and of Archeiomarxism touched upon in the article below. These observations are expanded into an alternative analysis of the history of this period in the Resolution of the Fifth Congress of the Workers International League, Greek Section of the Fourth International (Fourth International magazine, volume 8 no.2, Spring 1973, pp.61-9), and a letter from Nikolaou on behalf of the Workers Vanguard group of Karliaftis (7 February 1973, in Fourth International, volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, p.134) elicited the response of a full scale historical treatment that should be read alongside this account, in the Reply to Workers Vanguard from the Greek Section of the International Committee (Fourth International, volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, pp.137-56), and the History of the Greek Civil War (Fourth International, volume 9 no.1, Summer 1974, pp.22-37, and volume 9 no.2, Autumn 1974, pp.61-84)
Karliaftis has also provided a wealth of material on the history of Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece. His La Naissance du Bolchevisme en Grece (two parts, of which only the first is available in English) takes the story of the Greek Communist Party up to 1924, and Trotskyists and Archeiomarxists in the Concentration Camps of the Metaxas Dictatorship (1936-40) and In Devotion to P. Pouliopoulos and the Militant Trotskyists/Archeiomarxists Killed by the Fascists and the Stalinists (in English and French) deal with the war years, from which we excerpt a number of passages below (pp24-37). There are also two editions of his theoretical magazine Internationalist that touch upon this subject, including Andreas Papandreou, l’ex-Trotskyste, Le ‘Declarationiste’ et le Capituleur, and Cannon and the SWP: On the Track of the Social-Betrayers in Front of the Second World War (January 1983), as well as another in English dealing with economic perspectives (July/August 1984).
The same period dealt with here is covered by a personal memoir, Agis Stinas’ Memoires, published by Editions La Breche-PPC, Montreuil 1990 at a cost of 130 francs, translated from the Greek of his Anamnesis, first published in two volumes in 1977 and again under a single cover in 1985. It is this book that was reviewed by Alison Peat in Revolutionary History, volume 3 no.1, pp.44-6. General accounts of the Greek Civil War in English vary in both approach and scope. The policy of the Greek Communist Party appears in such general surveys as Ian Birchall’s Workers Against the Monolith, London 1974, pp.22-3 and 30-2, Adam Westoby’s Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, pp.24-8 and The Evolution of Modern Communism, Cambridge 1989, pp.142-4, and in a series of articles in Workers Press of 29-31 January 1975. Other general accounts include D. George Kousoulas, The Communist Party of Greece Since 1918, 1956, and Revolution and Defeat: The Story of the Greek Communist Party, Oxford UP, 1965. A right wing view extremely hostile to the Greek Communist Party is W.C. Chamberlin, Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Greek Communist Party, Washington, 1963. Stalinist accounts are to be consulted in M. Sarafis and M. Eve, Background to Contemporary Greece, 1990, and Dominique Eudes, The Kopetanios, New Left Books, 1972, a useful description written from a Maoist/guerrillarist point of view, which can be supplemented by the remarks of Vafiades (‘General Markos’) in the interview published under the title of The Crimes of Greek Stalinism, in Labour Review, volume 7, no.4, November 1983, pp.26-30. The grisly story of the fate of the refugees in the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ and the Soviet Union comes out in a review of Thomas Dritsos’ Why Do You Kill Me, Comrade? which was printed in The Atrocities of Greek Stalinism, in Labour Review, volume 7 no.6, January 1984, pp.26-9. The Greek Trotskyists’ own overview of the Civil War appears in The Present Situation and Our Tasks, printed in July 1949 in Workers Fight, the clandestine organ of the International Communist Party of Greece, and translated into French in La Trahison stalinienne en Grece, in Quatrième Internationale, 7th year, volume 7 nos.8-11, October/November 1949, pp.33-8. There are also earlier and shorter accounts in Terror in Greece (Workers International News, volume 6 no.1, October 1945, pp.l7-9) and The Guerrilla Movement in Greece' (signed ‘GD’, in Workers International News, volume 7 no.4, June 1948, pp.11-6), both of them from Workers Fight, along with a first-hand report by Alice Condos, Inside Greece, in Socialist Appeal (Britain), no.29, mid-August 1946. A few other accounts exist dealing with the civil war in its earlier phase, but with no indication that they rely upon any first hand reporting. Among them we might mention that appearing in Fourth International magazine in 1944, which was reprinted as From Greece’s Revolutionary History in Labour Review, volume 9 no.2, September 1985, pp.21-38, and Civil War in Greece in Fourth Internationol (SWP), volume 6 no.2, February 1945, pp.36-49. A few more details of the Stalinist murders and the repression began to appear in the Trotskyist press abroad after contact was re-established in 1945. Trotskyism in Greece, published in the Socialist Appeal of the British RCP (mid-August 1945) speaks of the shooting of 254 Archeiomarxists and Trotskyists in Thessalonica, and a little more information comes to light in Inside the Fourth International: Greece, in Fourth International (SWP), volume 6 no.10, October 1945, p.319.

*********************

The domination of the Thermidorian regime of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the bureaucratisation of the regime, the overthrow of the soviet system, the revision of the Constitution of October, the bureaucratic structure of the plan, the industrialisation (at first at snail’s pace, later at maximum) and collectivisation, and the incorporation of the kulak into Socialism (“Kulaks enrich yourselves”), the crisis in the relations between town and country (the grain strike), concessions to the bourgeoisie, etc, and the general revisionist line of Stalinism, encapsulated in the reactionary theory of ‘Socialism in one country’ – all of this isolated the position of the Soviet Union, strengthened restorationist elements (the kulaks) and along with the threat of external intervention, led the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss. The Bonapartist regime of Stalin destroyed democracy, abolished workers’ control, annihilated hundreds of thousands of party members and carried out an unprecedented orgy of crimes.
It imposed its bureaucratic, revisionist and counter-revolutionary methods within the Comintern as a whole, and it went down in history as the organiser of the defeats of the workers’ movement, beginning with the USSR.
In Greece, the Stalinists placed themselves at the service of the Kremlin bureaucrats, supporting their criminal tactics and their suppression of all the old Bolshevik and Trotskyist vanguard, as well as subjugating the new generation, but they were also able to develop by exploiting the authority of the USSR and the traditions of the October Revolution.

Rise

The rise of the Stalinist leadership after 1924 over the KKE, to begin with through Khaita, the Secretary of the local committee of Athens, occurred in a period of a general offensive and domination by the Kremlin triumvirate against the Comintern parties, a period of defeat for the Bolshevik-Trotskyist tendency of the world Communist movement, and of the predominance of Thermidor in the USSR. It occurred after the major defeat of the proletarian revolution in Germany in 1923, without a fight, thanks to the rightist evaluation of the situation by the Zinovievist-Stalinist administration of the Comintern and of the Brandlerite leadership of the German party, in a period in which the Stresemann government thought itself to be the last government of German capitalism.
In Greece, Stalinism rose along with the retreat and defeat of the great general strike of 1923, which was drowned in blood by the ‘democratic’ dictatorship of Plastiras, and the retreat of the movement for the transformation of the war into a revolution. The first Social Democratic rule of Georgiades-Sideris [1] choked off the enormous rise of the mass movement caused by long-term military adventures, as well as by the influence of the October Revolution. But the development was dialectical. The struggle against the war and the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to solve the problems offhe masses raised to the forefront the old fighting tendency of Pantelis Pouliopoulos and his elite co-workers. Pouliopoulos became secretary of the KKE, and the OKNE [2] was in the hands of the Pouliopoulos tendency. The old fighting spirit on the basis of the October Revolution penetrated to the tiniest villages. Similarly, from the war rose the revolutionary movement of the war wounded, which was dependent on the Archeiomarxist organisation and was headed by S. Verouchis [3] (the Stalinists tore him to pieces during the Nazi occupation) who led the General Confederation of Disabled and War Veterans.
The ultra-left, adventurist line of the Comintern in 1924-25 cost the movement new defeats with the coups in Estonia and Bulgaria, and sent the Greek workers’ movement into a temporary new retreat after its rise in 1925. This ultra-left lurch was followed by ultra-rightism.
From the Fifth Congress of the Comintern the Stalinist bureaucracy sought allies outside the proletariat, in the pseudo-peasant ‘International’, in the Macedonian-Bulgarian Federalists, in the left democrats, in the English trade union officials, etc. In China, the alliance with Chiang Kai-Shek, and Wang Ching Wei and his officers, the liquidation of the Communist party into the Guomindang, and the Menshevik-revisionist line of the bourgeois democratic revolution, led the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 to betrayal, and brought calamity to the Canton uprising (30,000 were victims of Stalin’s friend, the butcher Chiang).
In Greece, the right zigzag was linked with adventures by the deformed Stalinist tendency, semi-alliances with Plastiras [4] against the Metaxas-Gargalides [5] movement (instead of an independent KKE intervention) and with proposals for collaboration with the ‘democratic’ Papanastasios [6] the murderer of the workers, and against the Pangalos dictatorship, on the proposals of Zachariades [7] in Salonika and of Khaites from exile in Anafe [8] for the open support of the KKE for the dictatorship.
The rightist zigzag of the Stalinists culminated in slogans of support to ‘bourgeois democracy’, and of the ‘pure democracy’ of Khaites and Zachariades (1926).
With this adaptation within the confines of capitalist ‘democracy’ they closed off the halting rise of the movement that occurred after the war and helped the bourgeois system overcome the great postwar crisis of Greek capitalism.
In contrast with the politics of self-determination up to separation for the oppressed nationalities, according to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, Kolarov and Dimitrov denounced the Greek delegation of Pouliopoulos-Maximos for opportunism, and imposed the unrealistic slogan: “For a United and Independent Macedonia and Thrace”.

Contradicted

The slogan was completely unrealistic and contradicted the Leninist line of selfdetermination, which presupposed support to the nationally oppressed masses who had already begun fighting, as was the case with the Macedonian nationality, who included those inhabiting areas in Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, but who did not have a basis within the solid mass of Greeks in the Macedonian-Thrace area. Thus almost ail the KKE cadre were sent into exile on a programme of independence for Macedonia-Thrace, and Pouliopoulos, the secretary of the KKE, was taken to court with the threat of execution, where he gave an heroic defence of the line of self-determination. To save the honour of the KKE the slogan was withdrawn. But the KKE disintegrated.
They used demagogy – for pure reformism – against all those who thought the slogans on the ‘national’ question were wrong, and “those who later spoke of the simple protection of the minorities in the past elections” as New Beginning put it in 1926, had betrayed the Leninist principles of self-determination up to separation. They called them ‘rightist’ – they who only recently had supported Pangalos and were now supporting ‘left democracy’. These were “vulgar opportunists”, said Pouliopoulos in New Beginning.
After the fall of Pangalos, the Stalinists in the events that followed opened up a foul and dishonest slander campaign and tirade against the KKE secretary Pouliopoulos. The split that opened up in the ranks of the KKE in exile from which Trotskyism emerged could have been avoided. They recruited Smeral and Remmele, and they isolated and expelled Pouliopoulos as a ‘rightist’! The expulsion of the secretary of the KKE followed the expulsion of the Secretary of the Comintern, Zinoviev, and the rise of the liquidationist operations of the clique that ruled in the Kremlin among all the Communist parties in the world. In other words, they expelled the most enlightened, internationalist and advanced Marxist revolutionaries. They dissolved the movement of the War Veterans. Thus they sank into the swamp of opportunism. The victory against the internationalist left was due to the low political-theoretical level and to the concentration of petty-bourgeois and even lumpen elements due to the unceasing degeneration of the KKE.
The number of major strikes declined significantly between 1920 and 1930. The trade union movement was split by the pseudo-Socialists, and the split was formalised with the founding of the United Confederation.
The ‘third and last period’ of capitalism followed, which was the ‘Third Period of the betrayals of Stalinism’. The noncombative ‘combative demonstrations and political strikes’ brought the KKE to its knees. The trade unions fell to pieces. The strike wave was destroyed, and the prisons and barren islands filled up, and all with nothing to show for it.
The Stalinists thought that the relatively short economic boom would be a longterm stabilisation. But the great crisis of 1929-30 astonished them. On their evaluation of this they framed the politics of the ‘Third Period’.
Pouliopoulos, after his return from the Fifth Congress, defended himself firmly against the dishonest and disruptive activities of the fraudulent Stalinists and started a fight against the bourgeoisdemocratic orientation. After his expulsion he started the Neo Xekinema (New Beginning), a development towards Trotskyism which closed with his legendary death in Nezero by the shots of a Fascist officer in June 1943.

Excelled

In the meantime, in 1924 the Stalinist Khaita tendency had excelled itself and expelled from the KKE General Council the Archeio leader, Tzoulatis. [9] Tzoulatis, together with Ligdopoulos, the first delegate to the founding congress of the SEKE was a continuator of the Communism group which had raised high the banner of the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky, fought for the victory of the October revolution, and for the 21 Conditions, the first documents of the Third International and the basic classic work of Marxism, and had completed the union of the Greek movement with the Third International. From 1923 it published the Archives of Marxism, the theoretical organ that supplied the original movement with Trotsky’s documents Whither Russia? and Where is Britain Going?, and the fight against the Stalinisation of the KKE which was called ‘Bolshevisation’, showed the firm orientation of the Archeio on the side of the International Left Opposition.
Together with Tzoulatis, dozens of Trotskyists were expelled, betrayed by the apostate Apostolou. [10] (Among these were the secretary of the largest trade union group of store clerks, Karliaftis, and the majority of the Youth groups in Athens.)
The pogrom of expulsions in 1924 also included the party organisation in the Piraeus, for its ultra-left line during the 1923 strike, with the slogan “Seize the ships” directed towards the sailors. Along with them was the Seitanidi group Towards the Masses which took its name from a similar slogan of the Comintern.
The origin of all these expulsions undoubtedly lay in the Stalinist Kremlin and they were carried out by the Stalinist faction of Khatia and company.
During the period after Pangalos (1927-30) Trotskyism developed. The Neo Xekinema (New Beginning) of Pouliopoulos discredited the degenerated leadership of the Stalinist KKE. It raised questions about the great split between Stalin and Trotsky. It noted the degeneration of the KKE and foresaw that Archeiomarxism would contribute cadres to the movement of the future. But it also fought against the particular character of Archeiomarxism and its liquidatory work against the KKE.
Spartacus put into action the slogans of the New Beginning – for the creation of a serious Communist Party upon a correct basis. They centralised a staff of coworkers unrivalled in their theoretical and political formation. They declared their solidarity with Trotskyism, and publicised the Declaration of the 83. They also gave us the rich documents of the International Left Opposition, and thus raised the level of the movement. And the chief coworkers of Pouliopoulos such as Nicolis, Maximos and others became distinguished at all levels of the class struggle.
The Spartacists revealed the disastrous results of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of 1924 (with the introduction of 5,000 new members and the fall in the revolutionary level of the ranks of the KKE) which was nothing but part of the Stalinisation of the KKE.
During this period of 1927 to 1930, despite the relative ‘stabilisation’ which according the the Stalinists was an ‘organic stabilisation’, we had an intense crisis in prices and wages which precipitated strike struggles.
The tendency of the Archeiomarxists – of Trotskyist orientation – entered into open trade union work. Dozens of unions passed into their hands, more than 10 unions in Athens and as many in Thessalonica. They took over the Kokinias Local Centre in the Piraeus and the Local Centres of Podaradon and Kaisarianis in Athens. They organised important strikes such as the one at Lipasmate. They led the industrial strikes at Kokkaldikou and in Keremidadon, strikes against which the army was mobilised.
Equally heroic were the strikes of the bakers with Trotskyists in the leadership headed by Soula-Sakko, of the shoemakers (headed by Lampi, who went over to the Spartacists) within the context of the general strike which the Stalinists led, and of the confectionary workers in the industrial factories. They led strikes in Salonika, in Agrinni, in Patras, etc.
The strangling of democracy and the shameless outbursts of insults against the ‘Archeio-Trotskyists’ as “traitors” and “fascists” led to a civil war within the trade unions.

Decline

Unacceptable methods were used by both sides, both by Stalinists and Archeiomarxists. They reflected the decline of the movement due to the degeneration of Stalinism from the political programme of Bolshevism, whose principles only Trotsky’s Russian Opposition could supply. The people who hissed Trotsky in his first oppositional demonstrations and did not scruple to label Pouliopoulos with insults of “betrayal” went to the extent of murdering Archeiomarxist trade unionists, the baker Georgopapadato and the shoemaker Lada. Georgopapadato and Lada were the first martyrs of the Trotskyist movement in our country.
The accumulation of defeats and the crisis of the CPSU and the Comintern with the split of Zinoviev and Kamenev could not but influence the KKE, where we had the split between Spartacus and the Stalinists. The regime of KhaitaEftihiadi-Zachariades was overthrown and replaced by the regime of Theos and Siantos, which also fell and was succeeded by Zachariades (the GPU had the last word on these changes).
The Archeiomarxists fell into the crisis of the ‘Third Situation’ of 1927, which on the one hand expressed the tendencies of a political development which began to take place and on the other hand the influence of Stalinism within the Left Opposition.
In 1929 a ‘factional crisis’ broke out, which was led by Soula. In essence there were no programmatic or tactical differences, but only organisational problems. To tell the truth, these problems were caused by a lack of democratic centralism and by the personal and autocratic regime which Giotopoulos, the successor of Tzoulatis, had imposed upon the Archeiomarxists. Furthermore, there was a lack of a clear programme, which only the platform of the ILO of Trotsky was able to provide to rearm its Greek adherents. But these two tendencies were the most proletarian of the few that still existed in the international movement. On the other hand, according to Pouliopoulos, there were in the KKE a large number of members drawn from the lowest elements of the proletariat, from the lumpen proletariat and from the petty-bourgeoisie with an anti-proletarian psychology.
Finally, the group led by Pindaros, which was called ‘Democratic Centralism’, in fact launched such a perspective itself in 1930. The affiliation of the Archeiomarxists to the ILO was necessary in order to make democratic centralism work.
A crisis hit Spartacus during the same period. But this crisis was more general, and it had its roots in the deeper turmoil that was occurring in the Soviet Union, due to the bureaucracy’s betrayal of the revolution.
In 1930 Spartacus made a statement: At no other time – it said – had the collapse of the KKE become so catastrophic. At no other time was the retreat of Spartacus so great. At no other time was the Archeiomarxist group so strong.
In fact, as the events of 1930 showed, the Archeio-Trotskyists took the initiative of the unemployed struggle away from the KKE. From large meetings, drawing in over 1500 unemployed in Athens and as many in Thessalonica,they formed their 50-member committee in Athens and their 30-member committee in Thessalonica and mobilised wide layers of unemployed for bread and jobs.
A meeting near the Acropolis of between 3,000 and 4,000 unemployed people was drowned in blood. In Thessalonica, a meeting at the Fountain was broken up in a three hour long struggle with hordes of mounted police.

Official

In 1930 the Archeiomarxists became the official section of the ILO. The competition that took place in 1927-28 between the Archeiomarxists and Spartacus to become the official section of the International Left Opposition in Greece tended to favour the Archeiomarxists. Before the astonished eyes of the ILO representatives when they came to Greece, hundreds of militants demonstrated, devoted adherents of Leon Trotsky, who were Archeiomarxists who accepted Trotsky’s platform, and agreed to unite with Spartacus. But Spartacus refused to unite unless the Archeio disavowed its past. Thus it remained outside the ILO. The Archeiomarxists assumed the name of Bolshevik-Leninists.
The crisis of 1930 brought on a new upsurge. The dilemma of Fascism or Communism was once more on the order of the day. Germany was now the key to this situation, said the famous pamphlet of Trotsky.
The retreat of the KKE from proletarian revolution, the breaking of the United Front against Hitler’s rapid rise, the ultra-leftism, the theory of ‘social Fascism’ which obstructed the class front, the defeatism of “first Hitler, then us”, all ruined the movement and brought Hitler to power without a fight. Centrism was transformed into opportunism.
The campaign of the Trotskyists of Pali ton Taxeon (Class Struggle), of Spartacus, and of the Leninist Opposition for the united anti-Fascist front, and Trotsky’s famous What Next? and The Only Road, which the Bolshevik-Leninists published, and the general upsurge of the workers, compelled the KKE to make a turn, at the eleventh hour. But yet again their line split up the united anti-Fascist front. Now they talked of the ‘United Front from below’.
The struggle of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Archeiomarxists) within the trade unions for the programme of the United Workers Front won over substantial forces at the expense of the KKE. If the Spartacists had not refused to give them the four votes they carried, the whole Workers’ Centre in Athens would have passed over to them from Kalivas’ hands.
In 1933, the Bolshevik-Leninists, being at the head of the Workers’ Centre is Kalamata, led the great general strike, which was smashed although the militarists could not assert their control over all the sections of the army. Here the KKE was led by Manolea, who was well known as a member of parliament, but who passed over into the service of the Metaxas dictatorship like a common agent.
With the revolutionary upsurge, in the first student strike of 1929, which lasted 50 days and shook the university and the state, the Archeio-Trotskyists with their organ Student headed by K. Anastasiadis and Pliako and 20 or so other militants pushed aside the Stalinists led by the Velouchiotis-Klaras [11] brothers, to take the leadership of this strike.
The Trotskyists fought side by side with the Stalinist OKNE (Communist Youth Organisation of Greece), which started to decay and degenerate, whereas previously it had great struggles and great gains to its credit.
A discussion meeting took place, with Vitsoris as speaker for the official organisation, Pouliopoulos for Spartacus, and a representative of the Stalinists, where the opponents of the Workers’ United Front, the Stalinists, were hissed.
In the trade union movement, all the tendencies organised for the United Workers’ Front. A high level meeting took place between Kalomiris, Stratia, Dimitratos and the Kalivas, and the representatives of the trade unions of the Bolshevik-Leninists, Karliaftis and Sakkos. But the Stalinists and reformists attacked the Workers’ United Anti-Fascist Front in Greece as well. With the historic defeat of 1933, which led to the slaughter of thousands of anti-Fascists, the storm of counter-revolution in Europe, and the threat of war, Trotsky declared that any hope for the rebirth of the Comintern and its parties was lost. The parties that were unable to rise above this seismic catastrophe died.
Now he raised the banner for the creation of new parties and a new International.
In Greece, the ‘Bolshevik’ tendency of Vitsoris, Karliaftis, Theodoratou, Sakkos, Papadopoulos and Verouchis was the first to raise the banner of the Fourth International. It declared that the KKE had died along with all the Communist Parties of the Third International, and it started to build the Revolutionary Party of the New International.

Slide

The decisions of the Sixth Plenum of the KKE in 1934 brought about a general abandonment of an orientation towards the proletarian revolution, and a slide into the anti-Marxist politics of class collaboration, along with the beginning of the class collaborationist Popular Fronts. The passing over of the KKE to the strategy of the ‘democratic dictatorship’ of workers and middle and poor peasants, not as Lenin had understood it, but with the incorrect form of the Stalinists (for a regime intermediate between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and that of the working class) led our workers’ movement to great catastrophe and defeats, and confirmed the death of the KKE as a revolutionary organisation.
The Trotskyists, with an article in Class Struggle, and especially with the famous document of Pouliopoulos, showed with firm arguments that Greece was not semifeudal but a capitalist country, with all its relative backwardness. They discredited the view that “there do not exist the necessary minimum material conditions for the Socialist revolution”, with the conclusion that the unfinished bourgeois-democratic tasks will be solved only by the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the model of the Permanent Revolution. But the betrayals continued without end.

The KKE, allying with the Liberal Party in 1935 and rejecting the United Worker-Peasant Front against reaction, helped the Venizelists [12] to deceive the anti-Fascist masses and to prepare easily even from 1935 their compromise with the deposed king and restore him. When he was restored, the Popular Front (KKE) sowed dire illusions in the masses that “a new period of liberal idylls is opening up” and officially went and kowtowed to the palace. (Pouliopoulos, The Popular Front in Greece).

In the context of class collaboration, in 1935-36 the KKE renewed the collaboration of the past decade with the ‘democrats’ and the ‘democratic’ officers and dictators, launched the slogan of a ‘democratic coalition’, signed the Sklavena-Sofouli accord and supported the Liberals in parliament, who went on the rampage with their anti-working class politics at the expense of the masses, for example the Idionym Laws. Rizospastis [13] demanded a government of the KKE, Papanastasios and the anti-Fascist officers!
In May 1936 a general strike of tobacco workers broke out and extended into a general strike in Thessalonica, and Metaxas' regime murdered strikers. Thus a revolutionary uprising of the masses was provoked. The murderers locked themselves in the police departments. The bourgeoisie panicked, and while Trotskyists like Pantazis called for a government of tobacco workers, the Stalinists (Theos) betrayed the strike with the intervention of the liberals in Parliament. Metaxas headed towards a dictatorship without facing any opposition.

Collusion

The establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship was a result of the collusion of the Court and the Premier to hold back the ascent of the working class movement as it manifested itself in the general uprising of 1936, and to prepare the “internal front” for the coming war. The dictatorship would not have triumphed if the workers’ movement had not been castrated by the Popular Front. The KKE curbed the working class, and instead of sharpening and broadening the struggle against monarchic-capitalist reaction, it blunted the edge of the class with the conciliationism of the Popular Front. In the final analysis the KKE became the basis of victory of the Metaxas dictatorship.
Then came the Second World War. The theory that the Popular Fronts would avert war was shown to be mistaken. The Popular Fronts stifled the class contradictions, and the bourgeoisie, safe in the rear, felt safe to enter the war.
In the beginning the Kremlin rejected relations with Hitler. But then the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed. The Stalinists could not believe it. Then, however, they began their new tune: for the “poor” and “anti-plutocratic” countries against the “glutted” imperialists. These anti-Fascists passed into the service of National Socialism and of its finance capital, and stifled the anti-Fascist sentiments of the masses. When Hitler broke the non aggression pact, the Stalinists made a 180 degree turn. Now they allied with the Western imperialists. They now discovered that the war of the Western Allied imperialists was “progressive” and “anti-Fascist”, and they made a holy alliance with the bourgeoisie of their “own” state in favour of bourgeois democracy. They now passed over into support for the war. They exploited the pro-Soviet and anti-Fascist mood of the masses and brought over the oppressed onto the side of “our allies”. All the ‘Socialist’ and ‘Communist’ parties betrayed disgracefully the traditions of proletarian internationalism.
In Greece Zachariades called on the workers to submit to the ‘fascist’ Metaxas in order to fight Mussolini and Hitler, and to defend with their blood the bosses’ fatherland! The KKE became even more chauvinist than the parties of the extreme right! With the “theory of the two poles” Zachariades justified the double dependence of the politics of the KKE upon the Soviet bureaucracy and upon British capitalism: “In the war a realistic foreign policy for the EAM and the PEEA [14] would have to move between two poles: the European Balkans with the Soviet Union at its centre, and the Middle East with its centre in Britain. A correct policy would be to tie together these two poles.” (Zachariades, Plenum, 1945). In reality this double dependence was leaning only to one side, because the entire organisation and policy of the Stalinists “against Hitlerism” came under the direct control of the General Staff of the Middle East. (With the necessary capitulation to sterling of ELAS as well as Zervas). [15]
During the Metaxas dictatorship and in exile, in the prisons, on the barren islands and in the concentration camps, the Trotskyists became united. The two related tendencies from which Trotskyism arose – the Spartacus-Pouliopoulos tendency, and the New Road tendency of Vitsoris, Kastritis and Theodoratou – united.
Once more, in the Second World War as in the First, Pouliopoulos was to be found in the anti-war, anti-capitalist, internationalist camp. The crisis of 1930 had brought him to the forefront against the coming storm of Fascism and war. He became the pole of attraction for all the cadres who had originated front Archeiomarxism, and later from the factions that had gathered around the KEO and the Leninist Opposition of the KKE (LAKKE), whose leaders were Soula and Pablo. [16]
With the unification Pouliopoulos now became the unquestioned leader of all the Trotskyists who remained loyal to the Fourth International, and he fought ceaselessly against all the social chauvinist opportunists who capitulated during the war.
The slogan of the Trotskyists was elaborated by Pouliopoulos in June 1937:

Independent revolutionary struggle for the establishment of a government of workers and peasants – that is the direction of struggle in the period through which we are passing, and only thus will the workers be saved from the catastrophe and horror of war.

United Front struggle for the overthrow of the monarchist dictatorship in Greece, for the imposition of the immediate political and economic demands of the workers, and for the speedy preparation of the rule of the workers and peasants.

For Marxists the war was not progressive for the two blocs outside the Soviet Union, as the social-traitors trumpeted. As Lenin wrote: “War does not cease being imperialist because charlatans and petty-bourgeois philistines throw out a sugared slogan. War is an extension of the politics of finance capital. The fundamental point is to know what class is carrying out the war. War is imperialist when it is carried out by the bourgeois class for its predatory goals.”
Pouliopoulos added: “There is no greater deception than that which is committed by Stalinism and Social Democracy with the propaganda of the so-called ‘anti-Fascist war’.”
The participation of the Soviet Union on the side of Western imperialism did not modify the character of the war of her imperialist Allies.
During the occupation the most shameless social-patriotism was shown by the so-called resistance movement of the KKE, EAM, and ELAS, with the slogans of “struggle against the occupying forces” and for the “victory of the Allies”. We declared the occupation to be a phase of the continuing war. Its character had not changed. Neither was the question of ‘national uprising’ or ‘national liberation’ posed. The deception of the masses with pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist tendencies, who had been led into support for the war of the western imperialists and the domestic bourgeois class, was the most dishonest deception of the masses, in contrast to the Leninist lines of transforming the war into civil war, and for the defeat of ‘our own’ country.
Lenin wrote: “The national question in the imperialist epoch is characteristic of colonial and dependent countries which are permanently dependent on the imperialist governments.” “The temporary occupation of Europe by Hitler’s troops”, wrote the Internationalist [17] of August-September 1965, “did not create a national question, just as the now permanent occupation by the ‘Allied’ troops does not create a question of national liberation.”
Trotsky, as a result of the occupation of half of Norway by Hitler, declared that this occupation did not change our slogan of transforming the war into civil war, exactly because the temporary character of an occupation does not create a permanent colonisation and thus the question of national liberation.
The first guerrilla war of ELAS was an extension of the social-patriotic defence of the bourgeois state, according to Zachariades, of Greece under the ‘Fascist’ Metaxas. Its goals were not Socialist, but completely nationalist, patriotic, against merely the Axis powers, and chauvinist.

Chariot

The pro-Soviet demonstrations of the KKE and ELAS leadership were in the spirit of pro-Allied declarations, pro-American, pro-English and pro-French, with which they aimed to mislead the masses who had confused pro-Soviet tendencies, and to tie them to the chariot of the war.
The Trotskyists were defenders of the Soviet Union, but with the only valid means, that of revolutionary anti-capitalist class revolution and of the transformation of the war into revolution in the capitalist countries, not by the shameless submission of the Communist parties to the governments of the capitalist countries.
The basis of the ELAS forces was plebeian cadres from the countryside, because basically only those drugged by the nationalist slogans of the social-traitors would volunteer (another way being forced recruitment). The ‘ELAS Reserve’ meant in practice placing in reserve the proletariat of the cities. Naturally many proletarian fighters went over to guerrillaism because they were misled, still believing in the Stalinists.

But the military aid that such groups offer to the Soviet Union is insignificant. On the other hand, destroying the class thought of the workers, developing chauvinism, tearing the workers away from their struggle, sowing splits among them, and turning them against the German soldiers, these groups disarm the working class, and tie the German proletariat to their bourgeoisie and to Hitler. And they prepare the destruction of the German and world revolution. (Thesis of the 1944 Conference of the Fourth International).

But the organised groups, militarily disciplined, despite the misled masses of leftist combatants, were “objectively in goals and action, militarist, nationalist, basically counter-revolutionary, and in the service of national capitalism and of Anglo-American imperialism.” (Thesis of the 1944 Conference of the Fourth International).

Aimed

The methods of ELAS had no relation to the Leninist tactic of revolutionary defeatism, basically the destruction of the bourgeois state, defeat of ‘one’s own’ country, arrest of the officers, fraternal action at the front, and soviets in the army, but they aimed at the destruction of all Germans, as the Kremlin said, sabotage and the victory of the national army, etc.
The tactics of ELAS were not the relentless struggle of classes but a compromise of all parties, of Kanellopoulos [18] and Papandreou, as far as an agreement with the counter-revolutionary guerrilla groups of Zervas, and the ‘democrats’ of Psarou, with the blessing of the English staff. The slogan was for a National Front and a national government.
The Lebanon, Caserta and Varkiza treaties were treaties signed by the leadership of EAM/ELAS. The Trotskyists condemned them. They were beneath the contempt of all the militants of the movement. It was simply the logical extension of guerrilla nationalism. It was not by accident that de Gaulle congratulated the Stalinist national resistance.
The feelings and the struggle of the masses against Fascism, like those in favour of peace and against war, are progressive. They are of a spontaneous character, an expression of the inevitable revolt not only against the Fascists but against the domestic bourgeoisie, one of whose sections identified itself with German and Italian Fascism.
The duty of Trotskyists was to sharpen these tendencies of the masses, and to orient them towards class and Socialist goals. In this sense they were found at the head of strikes (mainly those of clerical workers at that time) as well as against round-ups, against arrests and Nazi murders, and in solidarity with the hungry who were breaking into the storage bins of the black marketeers, etc.
In this way they provided hundreds of victims. Below we give a list of the Trotskyists killed by Stalinists. Most of them fell because of the barrier of fire organised by the KKE headed by the GPU agent Bartzotas [19], in order to prevent the independent intervention of the revolutionary workers and of the Trotskyists from taking their place on the first of the barricades during the December uprising.
In the period before December the secretary of the united Trotskyist organisation, Kastritis, narrowly escaped from an assassination attack. But hundreds of others ...
All these crimes against the Trotskyists, along with the Stalinists’ operations in the cells of the Stalinist security, make up a story that has yet to be written.
The following Archeiomarxists were killed:
The whole organisation of Agriniou that went over to guerrilla warfare in that area: P. Anastasiou, M. Kapetanakis, L. Kapetanakis, M. Xanthopoulos, M. Zisimopoulos, K. Ladas, Themelis, Karoyeridis, Pagonis, a student, and many others. Of the old cadre of the KKE, and later of the Trotskyists, were the leader of the Workers’ Centre of Agriniou, etc, along with More, Touris, Pliakos, Bambakis, and dozens of others.
The following were killed from the Opposition in the KKE:
Asimidis, an old cadre of the KKE, Doubas of the party organisation in Agriniou, and many others.
The uprising in the Middle East gave another opportunity for the chauvinist role of EAM/ELAS to be manifested in the war.
Infuriated by the slaughter and the destruction of war, the infantry threw down their weapons. The front broke up in all parts of the Middle East. The capitalist chain broke in the Greek link.
The war should have entered the phase of its transformation into a civil war, if there had existed a strong Trotskyist party, and if the chauvinist forces of EAM/ ELAS with their pro-war propaganda in support of the Allies had not fallen on the rebellious infantry. Churchill’s staff disarmed all the infantry with the use of backward troops. He interned them in camps. Then the Stalinists began to work in support of the continuation of the war and for a government of Papandreou and EAM, while the Trotskyists inside the camps faced assassination attempts from those who had refused to transform the war into a Socialist revolution.
One occupation followed another, when the defeated troops of the German-Italian imperialists withdrew, the Anglo-Saxon troops entered Greece. This is what we said at the time, and we put out a proclamation of ours which was circulated in thousands, saying that it was a big lie that the Allied troops were entering Greece as liberators.

Tricked

The December events confirmed our view. The ‘national liberation struggle’ against the ‘occupier’ was a disaster for the masses, who had been tricked into supporting the alliance of the Soviet bureaucracy and the Western imperialists.
“Welcome to our allies, welcome to our friends” – the walls were filled with welcome posters, and the streets rang with the shouts of the followers of the KKE. Tens of thousands drugged by the slogans of “national liberation” welcomed Scobie triumphantly, and later Eisenhower and Montgomery, who drowned Greece and Cyprus in blood. (Nowadays those who had been allies of the imperialists only yesterday changed their tune, and shout “Americans out”. Their line was always determined by the directives of the Moscow bureaucracy.)
The revolutionary upsurge caused by the destruction of war, despair and hunger culminated in the December events. As with the revolt in the Middle East the uprising sprang from below. In fact there existed all the preconditions for the transformation of the war into a Socialist revolution – a deep crisis, a rapid turn to the left, a desire for revolutionary change, and a paralysis within the ruling class.
According to the directives of the Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Union, the KKE in Cairo made an agreement with Papandreou. It submitted itself to the demands of the British imperialists which had been agreed in the Stalin/Churchill/ Roosevelt accord. The Soviet embassy in Cairo was the godfather of the legal child of the counter-revolution, the Papandreou government of ‘Socialists’ and Stalinists.
The Stalinists Zevgos and Porphyrogenis entered the government. This was ministerialism a thousand times more treacherous than that of the ‘Socialists’, Millerand, MacDonald, Thomas, Noske and company. They entered a government for the reconstitution of bourgeois rule (“first of all reconstruction and work”) and for the stifling of the revolutionary storm which the war had provoked, just as happened in France and Italy. The KKE being relatively dominant in the Greek peninsula carried Papandreou on its back. The December counterrevolution was prepared with the slogans of a ‘Government of National Unity’.
“For a people’s state” triumphantly cried the Stalinists. “For a people’s state and law” cried Papandreou, and this law was passed with the bombs and bullets of Scobie and Papandreou on bloody Sunday in December.
ELAS, which had occupied the whole country, entered the December conflict. The rank and file ELAS members fought heroically. But the leadership did not leave the initiative to the ‘reserve’ ELAS proletariat. It feared their spontaneous initiative. Even in the fire of a civil war it held out its hand to the bloody hands of Scobie and Papandreou, and for a ‘Government of National Unity’. Churchill reached Athens in haste and in a state of panic. He ordered reinforcements. While he organised the crushing of the December struggle, his lackeys in the KKE visited him in the Great Britain hotel, and implored a peaceful solution.

Quixotic

They believed that the Allied governments should try Liber and Scobie. On 17 December Rizopastis and the heroes of the slogan “Americans out”, the quixotic ‘anti-imperialists’, put out an SOS “to the great Anglo-Saxon country of America”. There was no mention of the intervention of the world and Russian proletariat! Some ELASites who were revolutionists laid a mine to blow up the ‘Great Britain’ and Churchill. But the capitulationist leadership of the KKE intervened, and stopped them from dynamiting Churchill.
Only a patch of land in Zervas’ territory, another small islet in Syntagma Square, and Makryianni and Sotiria were in the hands of Churchill, Liber, Scobie and Papandreou. And yet something incomprehensible happened for those who could not understand, unlike the Trotskyists, what a capitulationist bureaucracy meant.
An ELAS trumpet blew for retreat. The December struggle was betrayed. The revolutionary Socialist desires of the masses were betrayed. And the Greek movement experienced a major new defeat.
Churchill declared to the world that the December events were the work of the Trotskyists. This was correct in the sense of the long term struggle of Trotskyism for the transformation of the war into a revolution, in the sense of the pressure of the radicalised masses whom the adherents of Permanent Revolution objectively represented, and in the sense of their untiring, relentless, anti-Popular Front struggle for the independent intervention of the masses, which exercised a great influence upon the rank and file of the KKE, EAM and ELAS.
It was misleading, however, in the sense of Trotskyists being in the leadership of the movement. Because within the class front there occurred an unprecedented slaughter of the Trotskyists (according to the message of Bartzotas to the GPU, 800), in order to stifle the revolution.
The betrayals continued. The first act of the ruling class after every war or defeated revolution where the masses have taken up arms, is disarmament. This was done by the Popular Front of the KKE itself and by Sofianopoulou, by means of the filthy agreement in Varkiza.
With this the EAM/ELAS/KKE leadership secured their own immunity in the ‘horror’ of the betrayal. All the officers of ELAS became enrolled in the National Guard (correctly so). But 70,000 ELAS guerrillas were disarmed and given up to the mercies of the reaction, of the Fascist scum. There was one exception, Aris Velouchiotis (Klaras) and his group took a left wing stand against the agreements that the bureaucracy made.
The second guerrilla war developed on a progressive basis. The war turned Greece into a powderkeg which threatened to explode and shake capitalism to its foundations. The black market, speculation and starvation wages sharpened social discontent. The gap between the poor and the new rich became an abyss.
The turn to the left was rapid. The masses who had shed their blood for ‘liberation’ against the Fascist occupier now saw that capitalist slavery still existed. It was only a change of the guards. The Anglo-Saxon imperialists had replaced the Hitlerites.
The domestic ‘democrats’ who had been threatened by a victorious revolution in December, now became ferocious to stifle the workers’ movement. Setting side by side the executioner Papandreou with the ‘pro-Soviet’ Sofianopoulou, they managed to disarm 70,000 guerrillas, and later allowed the hordes of state auxiliaries to slaughter the betrayed combatants of both city and country.
The guerrillas were led into the dishonourable trap of war for the victory of the Allied imperialists, believing that in this way they were helping the Soviet Union, but Stalin, instead of demanding a peace without annexations such as Lenin called for, had sold out Greece to the Anglo-Saxons.
Thus, persecuted and murdered in their homes and fields, they returned to the mountains. This time, they took up arms against ‘their own’ capitalist rulers, and the guerrilla war took on a class and progressive character.
Velouchiotis, with the indomitable courage which characterised him, came into violent opposition with the capitulationists of Caserta and Lebanon, and the disarmers of Varkiza. He simply constituted the left wing of the bureaucracy, the ‘Reiss tendency’ as we would say in the case of Russia, or of the Mao tendency at its beginning and not in its Bonapartist decay. The Trotskyists who were alongside him in his staff were not murdered at a time when dozens of others were butchered according to Zachariades’ orders.
He expressed the tendency which opposed the leadership, and which had been expelled after the betrayal and the defeat of December, and of the awakening of the vanguard and the class in general.
Zachariades’ KKE expelled him for indiscipline, slandered him for ‘treason’ and betrayed him. Thus in June 1945 he was surrounded and killed. Zachariades betrayed him hand in hand with the counter-revolution.
But the guerrilla war developed. The arch-capitulationists were forced to support it in order to derail it. With Vafiades [20] in the leadership, it became the fear and terror of the bourgeois class and of the British and American imperialists. The war reached up as far as Athens and Parnitha [21], as the government admitted. Stalin’s Kremlin sold out the second guerrilla war, as it did with the December culmination of the first. The KKE of Zachariades, despite and against the knowledge of the leader of the ‘Democratic Army of Greece’ Vafiades, who insisted on guerrillaism, wanted to fight a conventional war and produced nothing but a disastrous defeat, within a chain of defeats.
We were in solidarity with the second guerrilla war, and on the side of the revolutionary peasants who supported its leadership.
We declared, however, that guerrilla war in the mountains was equivalent to the abandonment of the class struggle in the cities and villages. It (guerrillaism) disregards the struggle for wage demands and reforms. (They did not make reforms even in the places they controlled.) It isolates itself, it breaks unity with the workers, and it leads to an impasse. It is a solution born of the weakness of the workers’ movement. The peasantry, which forms the basis of guerrillaism, with its dispersion and its individualistic psychology, cannot have a strength analogous to its size. It cannot attain Socialist and internationalist goals. The peasant class cannot but vacillate, either behind the bourgeoisie or behind the proletariat.

Majority

The proletarian revolution cannot win without the revolutionary party winning the leadership of the majority of the proletariat. To win it must base itself upon soviets as organs of the United Front of the workers and peasants. Guerrilla war ignores the strategy of winning over and mobilising the masses, ignores the soviets, and avoids the front with the workers. Its petty-bourgeois, bourgeois or collaborationist leadership fears workers’ control and democracy, and often silences its critics.
Revolution starts from the centre of capitalism, but guerrilla war starts from its periphery. Concentrating the struggle in the mountain isolates it from the huge reserves of the cities, and contributes to the unfavourable relation of forces and the counter-revolution. Revolution organises the supreme technique of the mass uprising, the flood of workers. Guerrilla war cannot win in a conventional fight against the superior military means of the enemy.

Hegemony

Only the working class can become the motor force of the Socialist revolution. Its hegemony comes from its position in production, from its forces and from the Socialist goals set for it by history:

The fact that individual Communists are in the leadership of the present armies does not at all transform the social character of these armies ... It is one thing when a Communist Party, firmly resting on the flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a peasant war. It is an altogether different thing when a few thousand or even tens of thousands of revolutionaries, who are truly Communists, or only take the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having serious support from the proletariat. (L.D. Trotsky, Peasant War in China and the Proletariat)

From the end of 1946 we foresaw correctly: “Guerrilla activity alone cannot defeat the capitalist attack. Left only to its own forces the new guerrillaism, sooner or later, is obliged to succumb.” (Karliaftis’ speech on behalf of the KDKE in the debate with the KKE)
And the confirmation was tragic. The city movement was betrayed, the guerrilla war was sold out by Stalin to his Anglo-Saxon Allies, and Tito closed the borders to the guerrillas. The government of the mountains was not recognised by Moscow, Belgrade and Sofia. It remained without international proletarian support (world mobilisations, volunteers, etc.), and without tanks and airplanes. And in the end, the adventurist intervention of Zachariades, transforming the guerrilla war into conventional warfare, became disastrous. This is what Markos Vafiadis, leader of the ‘Democratic Army of Greece’ (DSE) and president of the ‘Provisional Democratic Government’, says in his document of November 1948:

The abstention from the elections by the KKE was incorrect. The KKE created illusions in the people for the peaceful solution of the Greek problem. It did not believe in the possible victory of guerrillaism. It saw it as a means of pressure and engaged in indecisive politics, while the capitalist reaction was gaining time and organising its forces. During this period the mass movement retreated to the cities. From mid-1947 the voluntary recruits to the DSE in the country did not even reach 10 per cent.

At the Fifth Plenum of the CC of the KKE in January 1949 Vafiadis and Hatzivasiliou were made scapegoats, and labelled ‘capitulationists’ and ‘Trotskyists’.
The turn of Partsalides [22] came at the Seventh Plenum in May 1950, when he was denounced as a ‘factionalist’, and ‘opportunist’ and a ‘Trotskyist’.
In a short while the disagreements of Karageorgis, the editor of Rizopastis, and lieutenant general of the DSE, became pronounced. “Zachariades failed in the second phase of the guerrilla war,” he said, “just as Ionnides and Siantos did in the first phase ... He lacks confidence in Stalin to the point of appearing in opposition to him.” And he referred to the rottenness which existed inside the KKE.
Karageorgis, who had taunted the Trotskyists in speeches addressed “to some birds who chirp in the ravines”, now saw that the chirping of the guerrillas’ guns posed no threat to capitalism.
This was not the fault of the heroic guerrillas, but of the general line of the KKE and of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Zachariades was later to characterise Siantos as a provocateur, and his policy, in the cheap agreements of Lebanon, Caserta and Varkiza, as “incorrect politics which basically comprised a submission to the interests and pursuits of the British imperialists”.
But this was really a condemnation of the line of national resistance, and it is well known that the responsibility for all of it lay with the Kremlin directives.
Loukas Karliaftis

Notes

(The footnotes are those of the author unless otherwise stated)
1. Georgiades-Sideris – right wing leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece.
2. OKNE – the youth organisation of the Greek Communist Party founded in 1922.
3. S. Verouchis – a leader of the Trotskyist Archeiomarxists who had lost his eyes during the war between the Greeks and the Turks in Asia Minor, and Secretary of the Union of the War Disabled, which he led to victory, and was repeatedly sent to prison. In 1943, taking part in the anti-Nazi resistance movement on his own responsibility, he was executed by the Stalinists along with 800 others. His body was thrown to the wild dogs by the Stalinists while he was still half alive.
4. Plastiras – a bourgeois ‘liberal’ politician, formerly a general.
5. Ioannis Metaxas (1871-1941) was a right wing general who ruled as dictator between 1936 and 1941 [Editor’s Note].
6. Papanastasios – a bourgeois ‘democrat’.
7. Zachariades – Stalin’s foremost supporter in Greece, trained along with Khaitas in the Stalinist school of Koutvi in Russia, and installed as General Secretary of the Greek Communist Party by the Stalinist Comintern. He was the chief organiser of all the executions of Trotsky‘s followers in Greece. The policy of the Greek Communist Party brought about the Metaxas dictatorship straightaway, and Zachariades was put in prison and moved to Germany by the Nazis. Mysteriously released, he went back to Greece to carry out new betrayals during the civil war. After the smashing of the second guerrilla war he was made the scapegoat by Stalin and was expelled from the party, dying recently in Russia.
8. Anafe – a barren island.
9. Tzoulatis – along with Ligdopoulos, leader of the Socialist Youth in Athens (1916), and the first martyr of Bolshevism in Greece. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece at its founding conference in 1918, and along with Giotopoulos split from the SWPG in the same way that Lenin did (1919). He published the journal Communism (1920-21) in which he fought for the 21 Conditions of adherence to the Communist International, and rejoined the SWPG in 1921, where he built up a faction publishing the journal Archives of Marxism (May 1923), and consistently orientated towards Trotsky from 1923 onwards. He was thus the first Trotskyist in Greece, and was finally expelled from the party at the beginning of 1924.
10. Apostolou – a leader of the Archeiomarxists, one of the few who went over to Stalinism.
11. Aris Velouchiotis was a famous left wing Stalinist leader during the resistance movement, who rejected the directives of the Greek Communist Party to hand over his group’s guns. Expelled from the party as a ‘Trotskyist’, he was soon after trapped mysteriously and executed by the Greek army.
12. Eleutherios Venizelos (1864-1936) was a well known bourgeois leader of the Liberals, frequently in office during the early part of the twentieth century [Editor’s Note].
13. Rizopastis (Radical) is the daily paper of the Greek Communist Party.
14. The PEEA was the ‘Provisional Democratic Government’, or ’Government of the Mountains‚.
15. Zervas was a bourgeois ‘anti-Nazi’ leader.
16. Michel Pablo (Michael Raptis) later became leader of the Fourth International after the war.
17. Diethnistis (Internationalist) is the theoretical organ of the Workers Vanguard (Trotskyist) of Greece.
18. Kanellopoulos was a right wing bourgeois politician.
19. Bartzotas was a notorious leader of the Stalinists who produced a statement for his masters in the Kremlin during the second guerrilla war stating proudly that over 800 Trotskyists had been executed by the OPLA, the Stalinist militia, in Greece.
20. Vafiades – a left wing Stalinist leader who was expelled from the Central Committee as a bourgeois agent, and now lives in Russia.
21. Parnitha (ancient Mount Parnes), a mountain near Athens.
22. Partsalides was a top leader of the Stalinists, both in the EAM and amongst today’s Eurocommunists.